Once upon a time, in April this year, I was moving to a new company. It looked really good especially since they said that they have “Nordic (Danish) management”. All good until end on July when I had some well-deserved vacation.

In mid-July this new developer Petr Čaněk joined my project as developer. I knew nothing about him even though something was a bit off in the way he talked (choice of expressions, tone, attitude, frequency of words per minute, lack of article usage…), but hey! we are all unique and as long as the company decided to bring him in I was convinced that they made the best decision, so I welcomed him to the team, made sure that he had access everywhere he needed and then left for vacation.

After I came back, we had a meeting with the client and out project manager could not join but we (PM, team and client) had an agreement that I would be his stand-in (not only that one time but every time he would not be there). For some reason Petr felt the need to say – out loud – that this team had no project manager and because of that reason we are chaotic. I immediately responded that this statement is not true. We do have a project manager, but since he is not here, I am his stand-in, as agreed. I asked him if I could be of any help in this role, and when he said “no” I suggested we should continue the meeting. A few days later I receive a call from my line manager (in short: a person responsible with the relationship between me and the company) saying that Petr complained to him about me not doing my job – there were over 10 untouched tasks in my backlog. I cleared the problem (or at least thought I did) as it was a misunderstanding that lead to so many tasks being created. My line manager also informed me that out PM would be changed (the reason was that the new PM already has the rest of this client’s projects).

In our project we have this Sentry integration that would let us know when something goes sideways (I am sure most devs know what I am talking about).

About a moth ago (all of devs and dev-ops) have missed one notification (we were all in a meeting an ignored the email) and live site was unusable.

Ever since I made a rule (for myself) to put the errors in a common Slack channel for all the devs to see. All good, no one was bugged.

A few days ago, Petr makes this announcement:

“Note – it seems that current errors from production are maybe false-positive and they are not affecting user. Sentry integration will be updated shortly.
Second note – even these errors may be false, we will still take a look into them.”

Today I see tow dozen errors in my email and I notify the devs, that maybe something went wrong, as there are too many different ones. If they are nothing than only 5 mins of our lives were lost.

To my notification I get this from Petr:

Yes, the FE errors on production were mentioned on stand-up and also in #frontend channel. They can be false positive, due to complications with Sentry integration.

There was no mention of said errors in any of the stand-ups this week or past week.

This morning, when I got into the office, I was surprised by my tester who said that none of the bugs I’ve put in for testing are fixed. Imagine my amazement when I checked the bug-branch I was working on and the testing-branch and they had very different code! So I go to Petr and:

Me: hey Petr, did you get any conflicts when merging the bug-branch into the testing-branchPetr: Yes. But I fixed them. I kept the testing-branch codeMe: You should have kept the bug-branch code as it was the newest one (and I added it to fix some bugs reported on the testing-branch)Petr: Yes, yes. That is the one I used.

Half of the day has passed since and we still have different versions of code even though the bug-branch was merged into the testing-branch…Petr is on it (fixing).